No matter what Paul does, media ignore him

Ron Paul's supporters often complain he's overlooked when pundits assess the Republican presidential candidates and their debates. They have a point.

Ron Paul’s supporters often complain he’s overlooked when pundits assess the Republican presidential candidates and their debates. They have a point.

His close second place in the Iowa straw poll got virtually no attention compared with the focus on winner Michele Bachmann. A recent comparison of four Republican candidates by The New York Times included long-shot hopeful Jon Huntsman — but not Paul, the feisty, 76-year-old Texas congressman who generally runs third or fourth in GOP polls.

“I don’t get too annoyed,” Paul told reporters at a recent Christian Science Monitor breakfast. “I know how the system works. It’s been that way for a long time.”

He said he thought one factor was that many don’t want to hear his message about the country’s dire state, but he also conceded he shares responsibility because “people just flat out don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“How many people have read Human Action?” he asked, referring to the 1949 treatise by the Austrian economist Ludwig Van Mises on laissez-faire capitalism. “How many people have studied Mises, and (fellow Austrian economists Friedrich) Hayek and (Murray) Rothbard and (Hans) Sennholz?”

“Very few people understand this. They don’t have an understanding of how free markets actually work.”

Such explanations raise questions about whether Paul’s main purpose in his third presidential bid is to win the White House or educate the country.

“I have political people that work and do things like strategy,” he said. “But for me personally, I think only (about) trying to explain myself and sincerely giving people an explanation about economic policy.

“You can’t get out of a bust if you don’t understand where the boom came from,” he added.

Much of Paul’s message is fairly straightforward: “We’re in a big mess,” he says. “Personal liberty is under attack, our financial system is under attack, our foreign policy is in shambles.”& amp; amp; lt; /p>

He wants to cut defense spending by bringing home all U.S. troops stationed overseas, end aid to Israel and Egypt, shut the departments of education, energy and homeland security, phase out the IRS and abolish income, capital-gains and inheritance taxes, legalize medical marijuana, stop trying to prevent drug imports from Mexico, replace Medicaid, let people opt out of Medicare and provide a private alternative to Social Security.

On many issues, such as favoring the repeal of President Barack Obama’s health-care law, he mirrors his GOP rivals. But on others, he goes further. His position on drugs, reflecting his libertarian views, is very different, as is his stress on monetary policy and nostalgia for the gold standard.

Unlike his rivals, he rarely bashes Obama, blaming presidents of both parties for the country’s problems. Sharply critical of Federal Reserve policies, he says Chairman Ben Bernanke “isn’t the problem. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is the problem.”

His favorite Democratic president is Grover Cleveland, a conservative who served two nonconsecutive late-19th-century terms.

“He endorsed the foreign policy of non-intervention, he was a gold standard person. … He just thought government was too big,” Paul said.

All this may explain why pundits dismiss Paul’s prospects. While he usually polls a few points above or below 10 percent among Republican voters, he sometimes sounds like he’s on a different planet from his rivals.

And most analysts doubt he can expand support enough from a cadre of fervent followers to win primaries and the nomination.

Still, Paul insists his message is “catching on,” citing the growth of the campaign, the number of people being involved, the ease with which he can raise money and enthusiastic receptions on college campuses.

But often, moderators seem to ignore him in structuring the televised debates. On last Thursday’s Fox News debate, his first question came after 17 minutes, and he was mostly a spectator to verbal jousting between Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Paul said his goal is to “just work very hard, and make sure that I stay in the top tier and then eventually be one of the top two contenders.”

But though a nonscientific post-debate poll on the Fox News website rated him the winner, post-debate assessments again ignored him, underscoring how tough it may be for him to reach the top two, much less win.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News.

carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com

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